By Gordon M. Hahn, Landmarks, 2/19/24

Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin was a tour de force of both journalism and political communication, with a few caveats. Here I will address the issue of Putin’s long historical preamble to Carlson’s first question as to why he chose to invade Ukraine precisely on February 24, 2024, escalating the Ukrainian civil war to a NATO-Russia Ukrainian War.

This was not one of Putin’s communication successes during the interview. Many Americans were perplexed, consternated, and/or irritated by Putin’s long introductory exegesis on Russian history in response to a question regarding the reasons he chose to invade Ukraine when he did. But Putin did not do this to filibuster or avoid answering the question. He gave us a review of more than a thousand years of mostly Russian but also Ukrainian history and relations between Russia and the West for several very Russian reasons.

First, in that part of the world and particularly in Russia, history is the root of all existence: past, present, and future. The past explains the present and may foretell the future. History is sacred, not just because it is powerful but because, for many Russians, it has a larger, even religious meaning. Many Russians’ interpretation or view of history is defined directly or indirectly by the teleology of Orthodox Christian eschatology regarding the second coming of Christ and the advent of the Kingdom at the end of time. History is a phenomenon often guided by God and with a meaning defined by God’s world-historical project.

None of the above means that all Russians, or even all those Russians who have an Orthodox view of the meaning of Russian and/or world history, apply an Orthodox Christian model to their views on various historical or contemporary issues. On the other hand, this kind of thinking influences the culture and thus even the thinking of Russian non-believers and even atheists. For example, Soviet communists developed a proletarian model of a coming communist utopia that replaced the Orthodox utopian vision of their forebears.

Second, the teleological approach to history and Russian history—that they have meaning and even a predetermined outcome of one kind or another—conveys to Russians’ vision of world and/or Russian history as being integral or whole. Russians prefer and in good part aspire to the unity of their history, and this follows from their habit of viewing history as having a single meaning, goal, or outcome, whether under or aside from God. The single, predetermined end unites the historical process. As I have written elsewhere, Putin himself has called for preserving the unity of Russian history by respecting all its different periods as a single history that belongs to each and every Russian.

I wrote in my book Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture Thought, History, and Politics that Russians have a general tendency to aspire to, or to assume, the existence of wholeness or the condition of wholeness (tselostnost’ in Russian). Russian tselostnost’ includes monist tselostnost’ or simply monism (a unity between God and Man, the Divine and the material, spirit and matter), universalism (the wholeness of the world or parts of the world), communalism (social unity), and solidarism (political, national, and identity wholeness). Across Russian history, numerous Russian writers, theologians, philosophers, political, religious, and opinion leaders have articulated these five (historical, monist, universalist, communalist, and solidarist) kinds of wholeness in their work.

The desire for historical wholeness has particular resonance in the Russian mind when considering Ukraine, or, more precisely, Kiev. As Putin emphasized in his opening monologue to Tucker Carlson, the Russian state and Russian Orthodox Church were founded in Kiev. He reviewed the continuity between Kievan Rus and Muscovite, then Imperial Russia, and the interconnections between Russia and Ukraine across history, up through the Soviet period into today’s post-Soviet Russia. Thus, if one takes Kiev and thus Ukraine as well out of Russia and its history, then this leaves shattered: the integrality of Russian history and of the Russian state (having implications for political solidarist tselostnost’ and identity), as well as the integrality of the Russian Church (having implications for Russian monist tselostnost’). But Russians would deny this is possible: all these form a single whole.

With regard to Ukraine, historical tselostnost’ is intertwined with universalist and solidarist tselostnost’. Universalism presumes and might logically be preceded by smaller, narrower unifications. Semi-universalisms popular among Russians are pan-Eurasianism, pan-Orthodoxy, and pan-Slavism. Many Russians are enamored by the idea of, and support the unity of, the eastern Slavic peoples: the Great Russians (Rusians), the Little Russians (Ukrainians), and the White Russians (Belorussians). In this view, this ‘triune’ of peoples forms a united Russian nation with overlapping cultures, languages, and familial ties, as Putin himself has argued. If the Russian triune is a single nation, formed albeit by a trinity or troika of essentially Russian nationalities, then Russian solidarism, which is the most politically relevant of the Russian tselostnosts, would lend Russians a preference for some form of at least minimal ‘national’ political and ontological (identity) unity. In these ways, with regard to Ukraine, historical tselostnost—historicism, if you will—is closely tied to and supports the values of universalism, solidarism, and corresponding popular feelings.

None of this means necessarily that any particular Russian or even a majority of Russians requires that Ukraine or Kiev remain part of territorial Russia of the Russian state. However, it does mean that Ukraine’s and Kiev’s turn against Russia, so encouraged and cultivated by the West, is a blow to Russian national identity. Many Russians would be quite happy if Ukraine were to join the Russia-Belarus Union, strengthening the interconnectedness of the Russian triune. In lieu of all this, Kiev’s turn against Russia by seeking NATO membership and attacking ethnic Russians, and more recently, the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, is a harsh blow to Russian honor, an aspect of international relations that has been unduly ignored, as Andrei Tsygankov has pointed out.

All the above does not by itself explain why Putin decided to invade Ukraine on February 22, 2024. The main cause of that decision was national security: the threat posed by the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO, being armed by NATO, and then, in our post-2014 world, attempting to seize back Crimea and the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. However, turning Ukraine, in particular Kiev and historically Russian and Russian-populated eastern Ukrainian lands, against Russia added insult to injury, perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back, bringing Putin’s invasion earlier than it might have come otherwise as NATO expansion continued. Thus, Putin’s history lesson was intended to explain why, beyond security, Ukraine is such a sensitive issue for Russia. Ukraine’s break with Russia and movement toward the West is an offense to Russian honor and sense of wholeness, adding insult to injury, as it were. For the same reason, Putin mentioned twice that a large portion of Russian families have Ukrainian roots, relatives, and other ties.

What is regrettable and disappointing is that Putin’s historical discourse will have little to no influence on average Americans, who have a very limited interest in history, even their own history, much less that of a distant people or at least that of a political figure whom they have been trained to be suspicious of, if not to despise. Russians live in the past and future. For the present, Americans live in the present.